WordPress Themes

The appearance and content of your WordPress blog depends on the code in the theme applied to it. WordPress uses the instructions in the theme's files to display and format your blog's contents.

WordPress makes extensive use of PHP to add intelligence to your blog's pages. It also uses XHTML and CSS, which are commonly used to create Web pages, to determine the formatting of the blog's pages.

Although you can set some basic options for your blog in the administration panels (as we explain in Chapters 1 and 2), to change your blog's appearance and content you need to edit the theme.

This chapter explains how themes work, what they include, and how you can modify them to customize the appearance and content of your WordPress blog (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. The Default theme, before customization.

Figure 2. The Default theme, after applying some of the theme modifications suggested in this chapter.

Tips

• The information in this chapter applies only to server installations of WordPressnot WordPress.com blogs.

• To make the most of this chapter, you should have at least a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS. Although you don't need to know PHP, understanding a few basic concepts will allow you to edit theme files without "breaking" them.